Australia’s right-of-center government also pushed through a law against foreign political meddling, which was widely seen as directed at the Chinese Communist Party.
More broadly, the forced return of Australia’s last two correspondents in China was the tensest episode so far in a period of tightening conditions for foreign journalists in the country.
The ABC’s Beijing bureau opened in 1973, shortly after Australia normalized relations with China, making it one of the first foreign news outlets to set up operations in the country. Now, at a major inflection point, only a few international correspondents remain in the country, and Australian news media faces a blackout.
“Since the early ’70s, we’ve been in China reporting all the ups and downs,” said Gaven Morris, the ABC’s news director. “The fact that this is the occasion when we’ve been effectively urged to leave is pretty significant.”
For many years, the Chinese government relied on less-extreme tactics. Beijing has often applied pressure on foreign journalists whose coverage it dislikes by giving them visas shorter than the usual 12 months. But since early this year, China has become notably more willing to make reporters leave.
In February, the government announced the expulsion of three journalists working for The Wall Street Journal in China, saying that was punishment for an offensive headline — “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia” — on an opinion article about China that appeared in the paper. In March, the Chinese government announced that over a dozen American journalists working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post had to leave China.
Beijing said that was in retaliation for the Trump administration’s putting a cap of 100 on the number of Chinese citizens who can work in the United States for five major state-run Chinese news organizations.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/world/australia/china-correspondents-bill-birtles-michael-smith.html
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